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the hustlers—Skeet valued intelligence above all, and the early manifestations of Rob’s intellect (picture books notwithstanding) excited him truly. The image became regular and nourishing: father and son crouched over second-grade homework assignments splayed across the coffee table, going back and forth over simple sentence structure and arithmetic. The same intensity with which Skeet could battle her he brought to that coffee table three or four evenings a week.
    Skeet harped on particulars that Jackie, in her own childhood, hadnever even considered: penmanship, consistency of format, and above all, the importance of memory. With an old wisdom in his attention to detail, Skeet would drill Rob heavily on vocabulary, definitions, states and capitals, until the facts became embedded in the cerebral circuitry. She could not believe how patient and tireless they could be, the father and the son, both with the work and one another. She would pretend to be cleaning in an adjacent space, but really she’d watch Skeet as he watched Rob set his lips and point his eyes upward to ponder some elusive connection. And their son—sometimes prompted but usually not—would invariably make that connection. Skeet would grin and squeeze the back of the boy’s neck in his hand, then look at the subsequent entry to make sure the handwriting was clean. These quiet, unassuming moments, embedded as they were within her harried days, gave her not only pride but also a simple beauty she’d always sought but never known—made more powerful by the fact that she participated only as an observer. Something positive could happen without her wrangling it through sheer force of will, and it could be shared within the trinity of mother, father, and son.

    I N THE SHADED rear compartments of her mind, Jackie had always expected the call to come in the middle of the night, when it would jar her awake from the pleasant seclusion of dreaming.
    When the call did come, on August 9, 1987, she was at work, just before the lunch surge on a Sunday. Frances told her anxiously that the police were looking for Skeet. They hadn’t said why.
    â€œWhat’d you tell them?” Jackie asked.
    â€œI said I don’t know where he lives or anything about that man.”
    Jackie asked her to pick up Rob from summer camp at Branch Brook Park, since Skeet now wouldn’t be able to.
    She kept working, eyes and ears in a heightened state of alertness as she waited for men in uniforms to arrive and pull her aside in front of her coworkers. She thought mainly of what excuse she could give toher boss. After that, she thought about money and time. One of the maintenance staff had a record for dealing; it was all she could do not to ask him about the particulars of a man’s being arrested for selling drugs. How much was bail? How much was a lawyer? What was the average sentence? But the police never came, nor did they call. In this moment, more than any other that had come before, she was thankful for the domestic arrangement she’d wrought. Because she didn’t share Skeet’s name or address, she would be free to manage the consequences this event would have on her and her son’s future.
    She went home that evening and assumed Skeet’s role with homework; the summer camp assigned short exercises to keep the children busy. She was relieved that Rob, who had turned seven two months earlier, didn’t ask her why. Jackie was less patient than Skeet when it came to addition and subtraction problems and subject-predicate structure. She did her best, though, and only when Rob fell asleep did she start calling around, starting with Carl.
    â€œWhen they find him, how long’s he going to be away for?” she asked.
    â€œThey found him already. He was at Irving’s house.”
    â€œHow long? How long for dealing?”
    Carl paused, the silence a reply. Then he told her that Skeet hadn’t been arrested